Friday, June 19, 2015

You guys love to talk about responsibility, right? Well, aside from that jerk-off who did the deed, I blame all of you who favor such weak or non-existent gun laws that a guy as dangerous as he is could get guns as easily as he did.

A Monroe father, accused of accidentally shooting his 11-year-old son
in the face while securing his wife’s gun, was granted a special form
of probation Thursday.While Superior Court Judge Earl Richards
said he considered the incident to be serious, he was gratified the boy
suffered no permanent injuries and said he was convinced the father, Vincent Pizzolato, would not commit criminal acts in the future. Richards granted the 44-year-old Pizzolato accelerated rehabilitation.

Under accelerated rehabilitation, Pizzolato, who was charged with
second-degree assault, second-degree reckless endangerment and unlawful
discharge of a firearm for the March 8 incident, did not plead guilty to
the crime but was placed on two years’ probation. If he commits no
crimes during that probation, the charges against him will be dismissed.

Police said Pizzolato and his wife had earlier returned home from
target practice at the Bridgeport Shooting range. Pizzolato had taken
both guns into the basement and, after putting his own gun into a safe,
he began securing his wife’s Ruger 9mm semi-automatic handgun. At the
time, their son was in the adjoining basement TV room playing
video games.

Police said Pizzolato told them he had his wife’s gun pointed at the
wall separating the two rooms as he checked the chamber and magazine,
both which appeared empty. He pulled the trigger and the gun fired, the
bullet piercing a plastic rifle case and the sheetrock wall before
hitting his son.

Roof is from the town of Eastover, around
150 km north-west of Charleston.
According to the state law enforcement division, he was arrested on 1
March 2015 for drug possession and again on 26 April on a trespassing
charge.

Roof's uncle told Reuters he recognised his nephew from
the CCTV image (above) and that he had received a gun for his 21st
birthday in April. A photograph from Roof's Facebook page shows him
wearing a jacket with the historical flags of apartheid-era South Africa
and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) on it.

Dylann Roof was stopped in his car and
arrested, following a tip-off, on Thursday 18 June in the city of
Shelby, North Carolina around 400 km north-west of Charleston.

During the manhunt police described him as "highly dangerous" and said they had "no doubt" the shooting was a hate crime.

I'm Karen Hunter, a fellow MoveOn member, and I started a petition to the South Carolina Legislature and Governor Nikki Haley.

On the heels of the brutal killing of nine black people in a South Carolina church, it's time to put a symbol of rebellion
and racism behind us and move toward healing and a better United States of America.1

Can you join me in telling
South Carolina lawmakers:

Symbols of hate and division have no place in our government. It's time
to stand up for what's right and take down the Confederate flag!

The Confederate flag is not a symbol of southern pride but rather a symbol of rebellion and racism.

Tell South Carolina lawmakers: Symbols of hate have no place in our government.

Thursday, June 18, 2015

A face-to-face showdown between one of Chicago's most outspoken
anti-gun lobbyists and the Illinois State Rifle Association took place
Thursday night.

A little more than a week ago, Father Pfleger
called out the NRA saying the gun group had blood on its hands because
of the violence in Chicago and elsewhere.

So, dozens of NRA
members and other gun rights supporters turned out to hear what Father
Pleger had to say, and they were not pleased.

“We should ban
assault weapons in America. We should ban high capacity magazines in
America. We should title guns like cars in America,” said Father Pfleger
of St. Sabina Church.

Father Pfleger was fired up as he called
for more restrictive gun laws as one way to help quell the violence that
has become an epidemic in Chicago. He also called out the NRA and the
Gun Lobby for blocking tougher laws that Pfleger says shows those groups
are more interested in profits than in making the streets safer.

“And
when the gun manufacturers make less money, the gun lobbyists get paid
less money. So that's why they don't want responsibility. That's why
they don't want to stop easy access. Because it's a business and nobody
wants to touch the money. Well, the hell with the money. Life is more
important than money,” Father Pfleger said.

Although the 39-year-old longtime hair stylist
had filed a restraining order against suspect Michael Eitel, 45, the
man allegedly attacked her shortly after 10 p.m. upon Bowne's arrival at
her Patton Avenue home.

The Camden County Prosecutor's Office, who is aiding in the search
for the suspect who remains at large, did not plan to release additional
information pertaining to the case on Friday.

According to reports, Bowne submitted her application for a gun
license on April 21 and went to see where the process stood two days
before her death. Reports also indicate the police department had not
yet received the results of her fingerprinting.

"This woman's life was tragically taken because of New Jersey gun laws," said Bach.

A man was later seen being led away by police officers, but it was unclear whether he was the suspected gunman."I
will say that this is an unspeakable and heartbreaking tragedy in this
most historic church," Charleston Mayor Joe Riley was quoted as saying
by the Post and Courier newspaper.

American gun owners are far more likely to injure themselves or
someone else with their firearm than to stop a criminal, according to a new study from a group calling for tighter gun control.

The
study, released Wednesday by the Violence Policy Center, found there
were 258 justifiable homicides involving civilians using firearms in
2012, compared with 8,342 murders by gun. Even if a criminal isn't shot
down, the study found that civilians rarely use guns to protect
themselves.

"Intended victims of property crimes engaged in
self-protective behavior with a firearm" only 0.1 percent of the times
they were targeted by a crook.

Wednesday, June 17, 2015

While doing research for his newest book, The President’s Shadow (tiny.cc/3ksfzx), author Brad Meltzer came across an interesting fact at Secret Service headquarters: Ronald Reagan “carried his own gun” with him while president.

Meltzer was not able to determine if Reagan carried the gun from day
one of his presidency, or if he began carrying after the failed March
30, 1981, attempt on his life.

According to the Daily Mail, Meltzer was in Secret Service headquarters looking at “the actual car door from the limousine where Reagan was shot.” He described the door as an “eerie keepsake,” but said it was nothing to compare to the surprise he received when an agent told him Reagan “carried his own gun.”

Meltzer said he did not believe it initially, and the agent said it was “a .38 [and] Reagan used to hide it in his briefcase and take it on Air Force One.”

An Oregon man taking advantage of the state's open carry laws had his new semiautomatic pistol stolen at gunpoint early Saturday morning, and apparently didn't put up a fight.

Gresham,
Ore., police say former gun owner William Coleman III was talking to his
cousin on the street around 2 a.m., openly displaying the Walther P22
he had purchased Friday.

According to the Oregonian, Coleman
told cops a 20-something man walked up to the two and asked for a
cigarette. When he noticed Coleman's gun, the stranger pulled his own
pistol from the waistband of his sweatpants.

"I like your gun, give it to me," Coleman says the robber told him. He complied, and the man walked away with the gun.

Open carry
is legal in Multnomah County with or without a concealed weapons
license, but even gun rights advocates think Coleman made a huge mistake
by flaunting his new firearm.

Tuesday, June 16, 2015

“Every one of us has a breaking point,” said Jim Boulware. “He hit his.”

ADVERTISEMENT

A
police sniper shot and killed 35-year-old James Boulware — described as
a conspiracy theorist who had made threats against schools, churches,
and family members – after he fired gunshots and detonated explosive
devices shortly after midnight Saturday at the police station.

His father told CNN his son was enraged at police – who the younger man blamed for taking away his son in a custody battle.

Jim Boulware said liberal policies had spurred a Child Protective
Services investigation after he choked his mother two years ago, which
landed him in jail for three weeks – until his father bailed him out.

“I knew he was angry at police, he blamed them for taking his son,”
the elder Boulware said. “I tried to tell him the police didn’t do it.
The police were doing their job to enforce the laws. If you want to get
to that, you’ve got to go back to the liberal people that put these laws
in place, to where CPS and all can grab kids.”

The U.S. District Court of Michigan ruled earlier this month
that law enforcement officers have the authority to stop an individual
if the person is open carrying a firearm – to do so is not a violation
of any constitutional rights.

The decision was the result of a lawsuit that was filed in December 2013 by Johann Deffert following a confrontation with two officers in Grand Rapids nine months prior.

On the day in question, Deffert was walking down a street with a
holstered FNP-45 tactical pistol when a woman called 911. The caller
seemed rather surprised to learn from the dispatcher that open carry is
legal in the state of Michigan, but as the conversation progressed, the
woman explained to the dispatcher that although Deffert wasn’t
threatening anyone, she found his appearance alarming, in part because
she thought he may have also been wearing camouflage.

Officer William Moe was the first to arrive on the scene and his
interaction with Deffert – which lasted a total of 14 minutes – was
captured by the officer’s dash cam. Moe indicated he believed Deffert
may have been suffering from mental illness, as he appeared to be
“talking to nobody” as the officer drove up. It was later determined
that Deffert was in fact boisterously singing the song “Hakuna Matata”
from the Disney film “The Lion King” as he strolled down the road.

First, Lott takes the media to task for misrepresenting the underlying scope of the report, and for FBI's failure to adequately explain the content to its readers. Rather than track mass shootings or murders, the report in fact attempts to track "active shooter incidents." This is significant because it encompasses events where no one was shot or killed.

Despite this, media outlets ran sensational headlines, like the New York Times', "F.B.I. Confirms a Sharp Rise in Mass Shootings Since 2000." Lott contends that FBI exacerbated this misperception, noting, "The report discusses mass public shootings, but it never makes it clear to the readers that these types of fatalities and attacks are actually not increasing over time."First of all, John Lott calling someone else's work misleading is too funny for words. The word that does come to mind is hypocrisy, of course. Secondly, I thought the FBI had the final word in these matters, or is that only when it fits the gun fanatics' narrative?

Sunday, June 14, 2015

A national debate is raging about police use
of deadly force, especially against minorities. To understand why and
how often these shootings occur, The Washington Post is compiling a
database of every fatal shooting by police in 2015, as well as of every
officer killed by gunfire in the line of duty. The Post looked
exclusively at shootings, not killings by other means, such as stun guns
and deaths in police custody.

Using interviews, police reports,
local news accounts and other sources, The Post tracked more than a
dozen details about each killing through Friday, including the victim’s
race, whether the person was armed and the circumstances that led to the
fatal encounter. The result is an unprecedented examination of these
shootings, many of which began as minor incidents and suddenly escalated
into violence.

Among The Post’s findings:

●About half the victims were white,
half minority. But the demographics shifted sharply among the unarmed
victims, two-thirds of whom were black or Hispanic. Overall, blacks were
killed at three times the rate of whites or other minorities when
adjusting by the population of the census tracts where the shootings
occurred.

Restricting access to firearms for people who
misuse alcohol could prevent firearm violence, but policies that more
clearly define alcohol misuse should be developed to facilitate
enforcement, according to a review of existing research and public
policies by the UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program.

The analysis, published online April 30 in the peer-reviewed journal Preventive Medicine, summarizes
studies on binge drinking and other forms of alcohol misuse in
association with firearm access and use, including firearm violence. It
also describes the shortcomings of existing policies designed to
restrict access to firearms among those who are at high risk for
violence due to alcohol misuse—particularly people with multiple prior
convictions for alcohol-related offenses such as driving while under the
influence (DUI).

“Both acute alcohol intoxication and chronic
alcohol misuse are strongly associated with risk for committing firearm
violence, whether that violence is directed at others or at oneself,”
said Garen J. Wintemute, professor of emergency medicine, founding
director of the UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program and expert
on gun violence as a public health problem.

“In any given month,
an estimated 8.9 million to 11.7 million firearm owners binge drink.
Both binge drinking and heavy chronic drinking are more common among
firearm owners than in the general population. For men, there are as
many alcohol-associated deaths from firearm violence as from motor
vehicle crashes,” he said.

More than two-thirds of all homicides in the United States are
gun-related. Of the 16,121 homicides reported in 2013, 11,208 were
caused by gun violence. Including suicides, nearly 34,000 people died in
gun-related incidents in 2013, up 13.8% from 10 years earlier.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) keeps track of
the number of gun-related deaths in each state. Fatalities include
homicides, suicides, and accidents. The frequency of firearm-related
deaths varies considerably across the country. In Hawaii, the state with
the fewest gun-related fatalities, there were just 2.6
firearm-associated deaths per 100,000 people. In Alaska, on the other
hand, there were nearly 20 gun-related deaths per 100,000 residents, the
most of any state. 24/7 Wall St. examined the 10 states with the
highest gun-related deaths.

Suicide is the leading cause of gun-related deaths across the country
in recent years. Of the 33,636 firearm deaths in 2013, more than 21,000
were suicides. In fact, suicide accounted for more than half of
gun-related deaths in all but one state with the most gun violence. In
three states — Alaska, Montana, and Wyoming — suicide accounted for more
than 80% of all firearm deaths.

24/7 Wall St. discussed the CDC’s figures with John Roman, senior
fellow at the Urban Institute, an economic and social policy think tank.
Roman explained that states with the highest rates of suicide often
have the strongest culture of gun ownership in the country. “There are
many more suicides in places where it’s easy to get a gun,” he said.

While federal gun laws are uniform across the country, state
regulations vary, offering more lax or more strict approaches to firearm
use. Seven of the 10 states with the most firearm deaths in 2013 have
enacted stand your ground laws. In keeping with a state’s culture, Roman
explained, many states with these laws likely also have laws that make
it easier to possess firearms and buy ammunition.

In fact, none of the states with the most gun violence require
permits to purchase rifles, shotguns, or handguns. Gun owners are also
not required to register their weapons in any of these states.
Meanwhile, many of the states with the least gun violence require a
permit or other form of identification to buy a gun.

Gun-related homicides were also relatively frequent in the states
with the most gun violence. Nationally, there were 3.61 homicides per
100,000 people. Seven of the the 10 states with the most gun violence
reported homicide rates higher than the national rate. Louisiana is one
of only four states in the country where homicides accounted for a
larger share of firearm deaths than suicides. In 2013, Louisiana
reported nearly 10 homicides per 100,000 residents, the highest rate in
the country.